In the News: The legal system won’t save us from Sexual Misconduct

While survivors who want to seek justice through the courts should do so, “Lawsuits are not a strategy,”

They come about it from a different angle than I did. I focused on the reasons why it is so difficult to get a conviction. a fact they noted.

And in a country where nearly two out of three sexual assaults aren’t reported to the police and 994 out of 1,000 rapists walk free, Nassar is the rare perpetrator who didn’t get away with it.

But they focus on the misuse of well-intended laws and the unequal effect they have on certain socio-economic groups.

If we criminalize the behaviors called out by the #MeToo movement — those that aren’t already crimes, that is — we will end up with broader definitions of sexual harassment and assault. There will be a corresponding emphasis on greater enforcement of existing laws. And we know what that means: locking up more poor and working-class people, even when it’s so often those in power who are the worst perpetrators.

and they point out other groups targeted as well.

“Carceral feminism” refers to a reliance on policing, prosecution, and imprisonment to resolve gendered or sexual violence. A very early manifestation of this approach came with the UK’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. The act responded to public concern over slim evidence of the entrapment of British girls into the sex trade by raising the age of consent and outlawing “gross indecency” — which, as it happens, also gave the government a more effective means to arrest suspected gay men. (Famously, this was the law under which Oscar Wilde was convicted.)